Maria is a Professor in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Queen Mary, University of London. She is in receipt of an EPSRC/UKRI Turing AI fellowship award on Creating Time Sensitive Sensors from Language & Heterogeneous User-Generated Content (2019-2025).

At the Alan Turing Institute she co-leads the NLP and data science for mental health interest groups and supervises PhD students. She is co-leading projects on Language sensing for dementia monitoring & diagnosis and Opinion summarisation from social media, an AI evidence based framework during pandemics.

Maria has a DPhil from the University of Oxford on learning pragmatic knowledge from text. Her work has contributed to advances in knowledge discovery from corpora, automation of scientific experimentation and automatic extraction of information from the scientific literature. She has published widely both in NLP and interdisciplinary venues. Past awards include an IBM Faculty Award for work on emotion sensing from heterogeneous mobile phone data, being a co-investigator on the EU Project PHEME, which studied the spread of rumours in social media (2014-2017) and an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2010-2013) on reasoning with scientific articles.